Streaming After Dark: Steven Spielberg’s New Tech-Enabled Horror Series
Arguably one of the most terrifying ways to set the scene to watch a horror series is to do so in the dark. That’s exactly the experience that Steven Spielberg is going to tap into. Spielberg has created a horror series which viewers will only be able to watch when it’s dark outside.
The series, called Spielberg’s After Dark, will have 10 to 12 episodes uploaded exclusively to the Quibi platform. Quibi — short for “quick bites” — was created by former HP CEO Meg Whitman and former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg as a platform focused on short-form video.
Already, Spielberg has written “five or six episodes” according to an announcement made by Katzenberg at the Canadian Banff World Media Festival.
What is setting Spielberg’s After Dark apart from other horror series is that he is using tech to implement viewing restrictions. Since he wants people to only watch the show at night, Quibi’s engineering team had to get creative with how to deliver each episode.
Quibi engineers focused on user the internal clock of a subscriber’s phone in order to calculate when the sun would set in their location. Within the app, a clock will appear that counts down to the time when the sun sets. Only then will the episode be available to watch. The series will disappear from the app during the following day, only coming back at night.
It’s like appointment television or live broadcasting, only with a nighttime twist that hasn’t been done before.
Spielberg hasn’t written in a while, so the fact that he’s writing the episodes now is fantastic progress. As Speilberg said “I have a super scary story I want to do.”
Quibi will launch on April 6th, 2020 at the cost of $4.99/mo with ads or $7.99/mo without ads.
